Date: Fri, 23 Nov 2001 09:17:34 -0800
From: Tim Stillman
Subject: young friends "Making Love to Jesus"
"Making Love to Jesus"
by
Timothy Stillman
The sun was a searing evil mean red cinder that would not
go from the bright glary blue as nails in the heart sky. The shadows
of things and persons beneath it curled from the heat. They held
knitted together humidity and tossed the soggy unbreathable cotton
stuffing air back and forth like a catch ball of dying slowly. The
crops of Texas were destroyed, eaten away, again this year, as for
the last two years, by grasshoppers. Green plague and mouths that
nibbled out leaves and money and pride and little more than a
gainsay on the land that was now staring back at especially the
poor farmers with a baleful eye, with an eye that showed where the
mirrors of conquerors lie--in the heart that was besieged by the
green hell of grasshoppers.
I was in love with Jesus. Jesus Emanuel. He was everything
this land was not. He was not the barrenness that stretches to a
horizon that seems boundless and claustrophobic at the same time,
that seems like my bed sheets, tucked in at the edges at the corners
I only have to reach my hand out to touch, stretch my arm a little
way, for this is a child's bed that no longer fits me and is the
topography of my dreaming escarpment. And the sun blazes in my
bedroom window full of dust and dirt and ants crawling one
humpback at a time across the sill. The yellow sun line makes a
kind of sandiness in the window morning through which I look out
and see the farm broken and the hopes of my father gnarled. There
is nothing here but the basics. There has not been school for me
since two years ago, I think. Time melts here in the heat and the
desperation and the desolation. There is nothing more than
watching the crops die again. Watching the invaders from a place
that the local preacher calls hell take over, take charge, and still
our stomachs with their fat growing ones. Things with wings and
legs that hop mightily and heads that are so funny when you see
them up close, but so frightening as well. Military sleek and sure
of purpose. Strong and slick, heads and bodies like plants come
alive and malignant, and all made into an eating machine. Its gift
to us. Its legacy.
I sit on my bed now. Early morning. Sun starting to dig into
us, into the land, making the shadows of humans jokes of hotter
nights where little fans whir round and stir up the melancholy that
the air seems laced with. Bitter the smells of it. Bitter the aromas
of the bitten dirt and the ravaged dead bending over sick colored
plants that my father tries to grow, the shrunken deformed
tomatoes and potatoes, the way you would give all you are just to
see one crop turn out right, just something to salvage, something to
put in our rickety buckboard and take into town, where we would
sell it for pennies, but they would be our pennies and the grime and
dirt under our fingernails and in the creases of our faces, the
blindness of our eyes spent working in the red anger cancer sun,
the hurt in the small of our backs as we bend over and try to
salvage, try to believe our bodies running with sweat are
accomplishing something by being here, all of it would be of some
value, but the sun and the heat and the grasshopper plague seem to
be melting the bones in us. We want to stop. But like clocks
mindlessly running in a ceaseless land of empty horizons, we do
not know how not to keep ourselves company. We wish we did.
But it is not to be.
Jesus Emanuel is no beauty. My heart says he is, but I know
the truth. The kids at school, when I used to go to school, said he
looked like a water rat, said he looked like a defenseless scarecrow
that the Halloween nights in the midst of their hot stuffy stillness
would come to and laugh at. Jesus is to be protected for he is small
and he is sad and he puts his hands where his hands should not be.
They taunt him because of his heritage, because of his accent,
because of their bigotry. When I was there I could protect him
because then I was big and strong, but no longer. But my father
and the farm were to reclaim me the rest of my days. My flesh has
eaten into itself. I am still tall but now rawboned. The sun of
sickness hides inside me. I see Jesus once a week down by the
creek half a mile away, though it is now dried up like the
wrappings of an ancient mummy, with lines and density and dust
and nothing but a kind of surveyors nightmare when the compass
breaks and he turns to a divining rod again, but even that is no
good anymore. Sorcery is considered but how does one learn?
I meet Jesus every Sunday morning for a blessed half hour,
before the dawn arises. We have a half hour together. We lie
together and are empty milk cartons. He lives in town. His mother
runs a boarding house at which there is now only one paying
boarder. There are others, but Jesus' mother lets them stay there
for free for as big as her body is, her heart is that much bigger.
Jesus is now thinner than ever, if that is possible. He looks like a
silver minnow when you see him sideways from a distance. His
fingers tremble all the time now. His breath is like sour milk. He is
lovely and sweet and he clings to me. He tells me stories by crying
on my shoulder. He cries like a waterfall of memory that does not
happen anymore except when there are no more tears to cry.
Except when the impossible happens. Jesus and I are like living
skeletons these days. We should go to Mexico and hire ourselves
out on the Day of the Dead as stand ins for the corpses that are
stacked against walls that Mexicans observe and walk through,
taunting, tweaking fate, while the bite the heads of their white
skull candy treats.
We lie naked in the sand, in the dust, and we listen for
echoes of rain we haven't heard for so long we can't remember.
We try to remember the creek and how we used to leap from in it
and over it for it was always a very narrow one. There is on Jesus a
kind of pall that comes from incidents and degrees of pain and
happiness in that pain that is like a clothespin of sun burn on our
skins that we wish to get off of us but can't ever seem to manage.
Therefore we try to get used to it instead. There is in us a long
lineage. His mother was 40 when he was born. My mother was 38
when I was born. Our fathers were also middle aged, old, when
they created us in their wives' wombs. We feel the hearts of both
of us beating solidly as though in reprimand for our thinking the
things we do. We hold together from the front and it is good to feel
his heat against mine. It is not the feverish kind that bathes us all
the time when we are not touching each other. And we lie in the
dark sky and there are few stars and the moon does not shine too
brightly as though it does not wish to intervene with our
communing with each other.
The night is a shadow of this boy burned brown as am I.
We reflect nothing but eyes that say half an hour a week is a good
enough thing to live for, a good enough thing to dwell therein in
memory until the appointed hour. Jesus' hair is black and long.
Mine is brown and long. He has a compact face. Eyes that are
black and small. A mouth that is wide and generous and smiles so
sweetly when he is with me. I can make no one else smile. My
father is only always angry at me. I cannot do one thing right as far
as he is concerned. My father who chews chaw too much and who
drinks too much and who makes some little living (for tobacco and
liquor cost, he must have these things, food is a much secondary
issue for him--we all need to escape, I understand this) as a hired
hand on a rich man's farm two miles distant, a land that somehow
has made it to heaven, that is crossed off and closed off to the pain
of what happens here to everyone here but the rich. My father tells
me the rich man is less rich than he used to be, that the land is no
longer heaven there, that I should see it for myself, but this is not
necessary. For I do not wish to see the waving thick summer green,
and the rows and rows of growing healthy full plants, with their
leaves not torn and desecrated, and the tractors and combines
working in great roaring swatches and all those men mostly
Negroes working their hearts and hands and lungs out, risking life
and limb, and losing limbs more than a few times, Daddy says, just
to make this fat slobbering human grasshopper richer every single
day.
I do not need to see the King Grasshopper to know what he
looks like, and to know what he is like inside. Green and like leaf
arteries grown big and full and sleek and twisting tunnels and so
colored of bountiful summer they break your eyes to pieces should
you ever see one of them.
Today is Saturday. We will work hard, Daddy and I. We
will take each plant and we will cradle it to us as though it is a
dead baby, a miscarried baby, we will kneel with each one and we
will beg each one to live, to be the right color, not sick dead yellow
and chopped with caterpillar teeth, and broken and laying down in
the dirt that comes up to meet it and uses, to comfort them, dust in
little wind gusts of heat and desolation that makes the soul seem a
million miles away to the next horizon that we could touch with
our hands, by just reaching out a little, but the grasshoppers have
gotten our souls too as plant leafs and savaged hearts and nothing
more, so what could be the use of taking back the ruins of
ourselves? Except giving them the chance to laugh at us. To mock
and torment us. I live for Jesus. When I sneak out my window and
I race in the broken backed heat on the ground that is hard and
unyielding and like concrete under my bare feet. The cracks of the
ground growing and splintering and shattering and giving birth to
more of the same as though the whole planet has been found
wanting and useless and left to harden in a noon day sun that never
goes away, it seems, even in the middle of the night, when your
eyes tell you it is dark, but the whole of you knows far better.
It is good to lie with Jesus. It is good to take off his clothes
and for him to take off mine. It is good to entangle our legs and to
feel the all of him against me. We are the drinks of water at a well
that has run dry. We are the little salamanders who live in the flint
fire of our earth and sky and we salamanders can live and thrive in
coal heaps and flames that wave off in the distance and the not so
distant at the behest of the sun which is angry hell with us down
here and starts a match snap and flame ignite at a moment's notice.
We are the waves of memory and hope that live inside a
combustible world and we are not of it and we are safe within and
without it, for we are not made of the same material everyone else
seems to be. We make love sometimes as best we can, as best we
know how, two rude stupid country boys who will never be
anything, who will follow the patterns that have been set down by
those who came before us. We will spend our lives digging into
rocks and not understanding why they never bleed with cold
refreshing blue water for us.
We are tired all the time. We are hungry all the time. Rats
gnaw from the inside of our stomachs. We hold to each other. I
kiss his shoulders. I feel the freckles on them with my tongue. I
kiss his mouth. Our tongue tips touch and duel and it makes our
penises hard and our balls too. There is something so wonderful
about kissing Jesus this way. To have his hands on my hip bones
and mine round his waist and touching down to his hairless groin.
We are like our own waterfalls of memory. We are in a place
where the angularity of our bodies, our stick out bones, our stick
out boners, are the only promised land that we want, that we need.
I put my arms round his shoulders and I bring him to me and we
kiss boy passionately. I circle his lips with my tongue. I kiss him
on the side of the mouth and in the center. I hold his head from the
back with my hands. I kiss him with my eyes closed and with my
eyes open. We press our mouths hard together. We drink of the
other. We are a kinder grasshopper.
We are grasshoppers who take from each other but give
ourselves back to each other at the same time. We are harvesters
and we are planters. We are the world in balance. The horizon is
just as sticky and just as fly paper clutching, but when Jesus and I
are together, such things are bearable. I dwell within my love.
Whether he goest, there I too shall go. The preacher is fond of that
part of the Bible and makes the congregation recite it often. When
I join in, I think of Jesus and my dick gets hard in my cheap cotton
general store bought pants. Everyone else means the Jesus in the
sky. I mean the Jesus here and now and who will never leave my
heart. I've no need of the other one who is either uncaring, mean
without redemption, or not there at all, as he looks down on our
sunwarped landscape and sees such misery, and does nothing to
help us out; worship him for the goodness he is?, I prefer to think
him not there at all, for any of the other beliefs are an insult to
him.
I love Jesus' chest against mine. I love his legs against
mine. We have no secrets. We are the plants kissed by a hot sun
that knows the time clocks in those plants and knows out the bring
the secret oceans along in them for the ultimate fruition and
fulfillment. This land, my rickety old shack of a house, the rickety
shack of Jesus' mother's boarding house, the barrenness, the
rockiness of the land, the outhouse and the things moving in it, the
smell of it, the memory of the smell of ancient dusty school books
in the little room that is the school house for all the children, in the
back of the general store, the nights that pile up on a person in bed
like a million wool coverings that you can't get off, the way sleep
won't come, just stands there in the dark hated insomnia country
and when you make a run for it, bite the bait, it moves further, just
a little bit, and stands there again waiting until your body is so
sleep starved sore you can't stand it and you fall for it one more
time, then another time. But being with Jesus is like being asleep
awake. And to lie in the cradle of his thin bone arms, to hear his
little high chirrupy voice, to hear him talk about what he would
like for Christmas in a place that will never be his or mine, or that
of any of the other children around here and in all the places of the
earth for all I know, to rub his little hard penis, to place my hand at
the ridge underneath his balls and his sprawling his thin legs for
me, to lie comfortable with him, and look up at all that sea of
darkness that weighs a million pounds that we carry on our
shoulders always, to be there in that breathless landscape that
seems brilliant and bright and eye hurting even in these dead dark
hours before dawn cruelly returns, to be here and now is very
sweet, and makes--almost makes--it all worthwhile.
Jesus is Spanish. He and his mother came here to East
Texas when Jesus was a baby. They have experienced all kinds of
pain here. There has to be someone other people can pretend to be
better than. Jesus and his mother are It to them. Jesus still goes to
school. He still gets beat up on and spat on and pushed around,
because he is small and delicate and has a girl's kind of face. He
still can get excited by a promise that he will be invited to be on
the baseball team next summer. He still can get excited that a girl
spoke to him one day in class and it made him feel so happy inside
and maybe now he could have TWO real friends. He still believes
tomorrow can be better and will be better than today. He believes
that he will become a rodeo star and ride horses proud and free,
rope bulls, in a huge arena which will be filled with crowds who
will cheer every move he makes. He believes he will be the subject
of a movie, will be on TV a lot, and will drive a Cadillac with steer
horns on each side of the long front grill. I kiss the center of his
chest. I lie my larger body on him more easily than before for I've
lost so much weight to the sun and the land and the harsh hot
winds that rush to you and through you and take virtually
everything you have when they leave, then surprise you, come
back and take some more and you discover you had more left than
you thought you did--blessing and curse. Is there more still in you?
You hope not. You hope so.
Last weekend, during our 30 minute escape from the "real"
world into the real world or the world as it should always and have
always and would always be, he asked me if it would be okay if
he--he didn't use the word--asked me if I would let him if I could
get on my knees and just bend you know forward a little--and my
penis went up very hard at the thought of what he was trying to
say, for I had thought it too but had never mentioned it, so he was
silent for a time, and I told him, hesitantly, even more shyly than
he had been, how about this?, I lie on my back and put my legs to
each side of you, and hold up my--you know--and then you can
stick it inside me and we can do it looking at each other like boys
and girls do. I had thought a long time, obviously, about things we
could do that we had not tried, that I thought might make him run
away if I had said them. He nodded energetically and we
awkwardly, heavy handedly, laughingly, embarrassedly, arranged
ourselves, as I guided him in me. The oddness, the tickle of his
entering me. The enveloping. It seemed more that I was in him
instead of the other way round. As small as he was, it hurt me and
the hurt felt good. It felt like the sun had disengaged itself from the
sky and was in the most secret in some odd way the most hallowed
part of me, but hallowed only because his penis was worshipping
inside me still and hard and hot like a penitent monk come to
claim his piece of forgiveness and shadows where he could stand
and be cooled and refreshed and feel that his body at last had
something to give out, especially since it had been before this
taking in so little.
But sometimes so little can be such a great deal. And Jesus
filled me and it was great fun there in the darkness where
somehow we seemed illuminated as though our bones and skin
were phosphorescent to see this beautiful young boy pushing into
me and pulling out again, the grin on his face, the awe a little of
that even I think, and my asshole (we never talked like that to each
other, we wanted all of this to above all be romantic for we were in
love and were never to doubt it) felt his penis going in further, and
his balls against my butt, and I looked at his face as he fell into the
deep rhythms of his fucking me, as my hips bent down into the
sand and he pressed into me hard, as his hands held my legs by the
calves.
He worked into me as a farmer might work into his land,
as a dreamer of stars that were never to be there in the sky, and of
a moon that was also to be absent, keeps trying, keeps plugging
that rock that would bleed contentment and peace of mind one day
for sure if he just kept trying, kept hoping, especially when there
was no hope. Jesus moved my whole body up and down, he
reached to my dick and began to masturbate me. He held my balls.
He shivered with joy. We were attuned. We were closer than
anyone could possibly ever be. I wanted to turn him into gold and
to put him deep inside me and keep his warm and soft and free
and young and happier than he had ever been, I wanted to take the
human thing that was Jesus and turn it to a form that was
impervious to pain, to make it into a form of Jesus that did not cry
itself to sleep every night for every reason and for no reason, the
tears.
He held me like a box of sex, like a box of excitement, of
fireworks and July 4th had been subsuming my very bones and
foundation. His dick found my prostate and rubbed it and
massaged it and sent out electric currents to all parts of me. He
closed his eyes. He licked his lips. He was lost. His hands let go
my penis and balls. He concentrated so deeply, so profoundly. He
seemed to rise taller as he rode me like a palomino he knew he
would be getting for a birthday soon or a Christmas to come not
too far up ahead. It was his dreams the other kids hated. Because
they had had theirs knocked out of them by the day to day hand to
mouth living and they did not like the shiny bright new that was in
Jesus, but that was in Jesus less and less as time went on, save
here, save now, when my boyfriend was fucking me, and his head
began to tremble, there was a curious kind of sighing that came out
of him that I had never heard before, and his hands shook a little
more than they had begun to do all the time.
He pulled his head back. His hair was sweaty. It felt behind
him, lay on his shoulders like thick dark hay. His whole body
strove into me. I believed I could see the pulses of little blue veins
in his neck and forehead beating hard, though I doubt I really could
see them. His balls whapped against my hole and his penis came
faster and faster in and out in and out, his groin hit between my
legs over and again, and he hurt me so delightfully, and was so lost
in himself because he was inside me, as I spread my legs further
apart, as I put my ankles to his shoulders so he could get even
further inside me. He now held to my ankles there.
I thought, whether thou goest I shall go. I love you Lord
Jesus asleep in the hay. If Jesus be with me, who can be against
me? I shall walk into tomorrow with you beside me and I shall not
be afraid, for my Lord comforteth me, he maketh me to lie beside
still waters, he restoreth my soul. I don't know if I was saying
these words aloud our just thinking them, but I spurted and Jesus
was home in his heaven as he dry came a moment later into me,
and his staggered into me and opened shutters in me I had not
known beforehand had been so tightly closed, as his penis
trembled and knocked and shivered and shook my core, as he came
down a little and a little bit more, his head, his face turning
downward, as he opened his eyes and delicately happily, like it
was breakable china, the greatest art work known to man, touched
my cum on my stomach, as he leaned over me, as he leaned to me,
as he lay on me, as his long black sweaty hair fell downward to
each side of my equally sweaty hair and face, as Jesus kissed me,
firmly and surely and with no fear or shame. Our bodies were
dripping of the night, from it and from the raw painting we had just
ignited in it. His arms held round me and mine held round him.
Strands of our hair and each other's were on our faces. We were
stronger than oak trees in that moment.
We lay for a time. Till we had to be up and dressed and
heading for home. He for chores at his mom's boarding house, for
guests who lived there for free, but they had hard times and were
to be treated and worked for with as great a fierce effort as if they
had been able to pay. I had to go home to watch the burned cinder
sun turn our hardscrabble farm more desolate each clock turn of
the day. But for a moment or two more, our bellies ingesting as
souvenirs for him and me, my cum. My asshole still feeling his
prick like warm scrapy reviving wool scrubbing rush inside me. I
held to him and he held to me. As we took a deep breath of each
other, a breath that we all but held until the next time we could be
together and then expended those held breaths in one gush of
gratitude and worship when the week had so slowly passed by.
Then he did what he always did, every night of his life, before he
went to sleep, every time we were together, and especially right
before we parted.
Jesus wept.
the end